by Hugh Brogan
The race problem had never been confined to the South, but not until the mid-1960s could it be said that it was primarily a non-Southern affair. This change was as unfortunate as the other was encouraging. Black and white Americans in the North and West now discovered that their country had exchanged one trap for another.
It was part of the price to be paid for tolerating the South’s backwardness for so long. Everywhere in the second half of the twentieth century, as communications have improved, poor and dispossessed country-dwellers, victims of the huge transformation which has swollen earth’s population and devalued ancient ways while tantalizing men with hope, have swarmed into the cities. The shanty-town, the new slum full of former peasants, is the chief architectural monument of our age. So it was in America. For three generations the poor people of the South had been confined in poverty, disease and ignorance, cramped in their beautiful, benighted homeland; but then came capital and technology: tractors and cotton-picking machines to mechanize agriculture, federal highways and Greyhound buses to carry the former cotton-pickers away to the urban mirage. Some went to Houston, Dallas, New Orleans and, most of all, to Atlanta, which consciously planned to become the new capital of the New South; but more headed north, to Chicago, Detroit, New York; or west to Los Angeles. And they found, all too many of them, that urban slums were worse than rural ones.
For the African-Americans arrived too late; or rather, the very circumstances which had enabled them to move to the city enabled others to move away from it. The huge expansion of the American economy during and after the Second World War had expressed itself in the vast expansion of the American suburbs – monuments to our time only less characteristic than the shanty-towns, and infinitely more agreeable; indeed, one of the great civilized achievements of all history. There, surrounded by the nearest thing they could achieve to green lawns (sometimes, because of the hot climate, ivy has to do as a substitute for grass), shaded by the trees prudently planted along all the roadways, in white-painted frame houses that always seem amazingly big to British eyes, air-conditioned, centrally heated, with an ever-growing array of durable toys – washing-machines, washing-up machines, hi-fi systems, plug-in telephones and of course video systems and colour televisions – American families can tell themselves that they have achieved the good life, and can worry that it is not better. It is not just a matter of the upper or professional classes. The great post-war boom, which ran without serious interruption from 1945 to 1973, spread this affluence downwards with astonishing speed and completeness. The abundance of America was available to most Americans. Could it be said to matter that the ownership of America was still concentrated in comparatively few hands when the day was near (it arrived in the late seventies) that there was one automobile for every two persons in the United States?
The automobile was the clue, the sine qua non, the sole instrument which made possible the spreading of the suburbs by thousands of square miles, the coming of the suburban shopping malls, the supermarkets, the hypermarkets, the flyovers and freeways which undergirt the new way of life. Eventually the car would become the author of ruin as well as of happiness, when its insatiable need for petrol outstripped even the abundant supply of American oil and, by oversetting the U S balance of payments and putting crucial amounts of wealth and power in the hands of foreign suppliers, upset not only domestic tranquillity but the prospects of peace in the world. But in the fifties and sixties no premonition of this development came to disturb the complacency of the prosperous whites.
Instead came the blacks. They moved north, and discovered when they arrived that there was work for most of them (not all), but not the best work; housing, but only the worst; education, but not what they needed. They poured into the inner cities as the whites moved out, so that before long blacks would be in the majority in places such as Washington, DC, and Cleveland, Ohio; but the jobs moved with the original inhabitants. The coming of the blacks, in fact, accelerated a crisis which was already pressing on the cities: the problem of how to finance themselves as industrial and commercial enterprise moved outside their limits. This problem was not made any easier by the persistence of outmoded political arrangements, so that there was, for example, no unitary government for the whole of greater New York, which spreads across three states and half Long Island; and no possibility of governing Chicago as a whole except through the single unifying agency of the Cook County Democratic party, the last of the great urban machines, which was not likely to last for ever. The problem was made worse by the fact that the black incomers became heavy burdens on the welfare system, both local and federal. As the affluent suburbs spread, so did the indigent black slums, in which a way of life, compounded of welfare payments, crime, drugs and exploitation by absentee landlords and all-too-present storekeepers, was mitigated only by such resources as the new city-dwellers could muster for themselves: their racial and family loyalties, their black culture and their religion – perhaps rather their religions, for by 1960 a new movement was very much to the fore, the Nation of Islam, of which one Elijah Muhammad (né Poole) was the Prophet: he taught a complete rejection of Christianity as the creed of the white devils, and insisted on black separatism in every sphere of life. By the time of Kennedy’s death it was clear to many observers that the pressing problems of the racial ghettoes and the decaying cities would not wait for very much longer; New York, it might be said, was the nation’s biggest problem; but most Americans averted their gaze, or made do with day-to-day grumbling about the rising crime rate.
The explosion of the civil rights movement made this blind attitude untenable. In 1960, 7,560,000 African-Americans lived outside the South: they too had their bitter wrongs, and when the great revolution began were not slow to demand that they be righted. There were rent strikes in the Harlem slums in 1963; next year, rioting, burning, looting, there and in half a dozen other places in the North, because of police brutality. In 1965 the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles exploded. Watts was a rundown area into which more than 80,000 blacks were crammed, suffering congestion that was four times greater than anything elsewhere in the city: restrictive covenants imposed by banks and real-estate agents made it difficult for even the more prosperous to move into better, white areas. There was a high level of unemployment (30 per cent). Buildings, shops and other businesses were mostly owned by absentee whites, who squeezed as much profit out of their property as they could, without regard to general social conditions. In all this Watts was typical of black ghettoes everywhere. It was August; the city sweltered under its blanket of car-generated smog; tempers were fragile. An altercation between a policeman and a young black motorist, in which the cop drew his gun, led to a horrifying outbreak, a riot on the scale of the New York draft riots of 1863, which left thirty-four dead, 1,032 injured, and damaged an estimated forty million dollars worth of property. Next to the bloodshed, the most memorable thing about the riot was the gleeful fashion in which the ghetto-dwellers descended on the shops and looted them of everything worth carrying away. In 1966 there were more riots, East and West, North and South: in Brooklyn, Atlanta, Chicago, Omaha and elsewhere. There had been nothing like these outbreaks since the American Revolution; even the labour troubles of the late nineteenth century had not posed such a fundamental challenge; but it was a challenge without hope. The tall towers of corporate America, glass and steel and concrete, were not going to fall to the siege of any mob, whatever its numbers or its grievances.
The remedies applied to the South proved to be of little use elsewhere. Something could be done for some of the suffering. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was passed to accelerate school desegregation, North and South; a pre-school education programme, ‘Operation Headstart’, began to do something to correct the educational disadvantages of the little children of the slums; the courts ruled repeatedly against all schemes of de facto school segregation in Northern cities, requiring the school systems to attain the right balance of races in the classroom (whatever that was) by bus
sing black and white children in all directions, without regard to the principle of the ‘neighbourhood school’ which most Americans cherished. The Small Business Administration, set up early in the Eisenhower Presidency, was happy to help would-be black entrepreneurs and shopkeepers with cheap loans and technical advice, even on such mundane but essential points as how to keep accounts. In 1968, in the last great law of the Johnson administration, an Open Housing Act was passed, which forbade discrimination in the rental or sale of housing on the basis of race, colour, religion or national origin. But the fundamental evil continued, little affected.
For with the disappearance of white supremacy, the chief purpose of which had always been to maintain a certain kind of class ascendancy in the South, African-Americans found themselves up against a social structure that was just as unyielding, though based on very different considerations. Racial prejudice was among them, for some form of racism is too common in human society for there to be any hope of Americans outgrowing it entirely in one decade. Hating your neighbour is almost as secure a psychological prop as loving him, especially if he differs from you in looks, language or habits. But the organizing social principle which now oppressed the blacks was quite different, and even more basic to human nature; was indeed one of the dominating themes of American history. In a phrase, the Great Migration from the South now came up against the consequences of the Great Migration of the nineteenth century.
The geographical and occupational mobility of American society is so great as sometimes to dazzle and deceive the eye. The educated American middle class does, to a surprising degree, live according to the enlightened ideology of the Founding Fathers and the benevolent ethics of conventional Christianity. Its individual members can be as stupid and selfish as anyone else, but the class as a whole tries to live up to its formal belief in the equality of human rights and the importance of maintaining an open society. The unlimited prosperity of the post-war period and the swelling birth-rate of the forties and fifties greatly increased the size of this class; it was highly active and vocal both politically and culturally; it was from its ranks that the blacks drew their chief white allies; it was this class which helped the black cause financially; and it was the ideology of this class which the leading black organizations made their own, for ‘equality of opportunity’ was exactly what they wanted.
There was a certain irony in this convergence of the most and the least prosperous Americans; but it was observed without amusement by the bulk of Northern whites. These looked on the commitment of the middle class to equality as fraudulent, for they were well aware that there was very little equality of opportunity between the children of the richer suburbs and the children of the poorer; between the professional and the manual working classes; between the graduates of Harvard University and those who had not even got to high school. To this lower middle class (to call it working class or proletarian would badly distort the truth about American conditions) the point of America had never been equality, or even opportunity; it had been security. These descendants of the Irish, Italians and Slavs knew that their parents and grandparents had come to the United States mostly to escape intolerable conditions at home, and that they had succeeded largely through group solidarity, which had rapidly, but not without great effort, won them ascendancy in certain jobs and certain neighbourhoods: one thinks of the traditional Irish dominance in police forces and fire brigades, and the proliferation of ‘Little Italies’, ‘Little Germanies’, and so on. Talented individuals might and did escape from their tribes of origin into the larger world, but for most the satisfying thing about American city life was that each ethnic group had its niche, in which all its members could nest. The melting-pot, beyond a certain point (the acquisition of citizenship, the adoption of the English language), did not melt, or did so only very slowly.8 It was extremely important to these groups that their monopolistic hold on certain jobs and neighbourhoods, which guaranteed their identity, should be maintained. In Gary, Indiana, for example, there was a hereditary caste of steelworkers, most reluctant to make room for black newcomers, though by the end of the sixties Gary had a black mayor. In nearby Chicago, Irish and Polish neighbourhoods stubbornly clung to their homogeneity, though they were surrounded by areas of equally solid black occupancy. And everywhere there was the need to protect a family’s chief investment, its dwelling. When a black tried to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, his prospective neighbour observed, ‘Probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.’
None of this might have mattered very much if the American city had retained its economic vitality. Instead, for reasons already given, it was beginning to decay at its core, and the arrival of numberless unemployed blacks, who were in many cases unemployable (either because the job market was closed to them or because the demand for unskilled labour was shrinking fast), simply accelerated the decay. Furthermore, the inner city was already under deeply destructive pressure from various quarters. It was being torn down in all directions to make room for motorways, or to enable real-estate developers to make fortunes by putting up more and more gigantic office-blocks or, bitter irony, so that huge areas of monstrously ugly, dispiriting public housing could be erected with subsidies from the federal government paid under the Housing Act of 1949. Ethnic neighbourhoods began to seem like islands under siege by the tide, or like fortresses isolated from each other by an invading army. If the enemy were allowed to encroach, the neighbourhood shops and small industrial concerns, which gave employment to many and satisfaction to all, would be the first to go. Then the private houses would be demolished, in larger or smaller numbers; those inhabitants who could would move out, hoping to reconstitute their lives elsewhere; and the blacks (or, in New York, the Puerto Ricans) would begin to move in, which would in turn be the signal for the final desperate scramble outwards to the suburbs. The blacks would not inherit a going concern, as the Italians had once inherited the Lower East Side of New York from the Irish, and they from the Yankees. Instead they would fall heir to a vast area of decaying housing, with decaying services and no prospects except of indefinite reliance on welfare. They were not even safe from direct economic exploitation, for many slum landlords continued to exact high rents while doing the absolute minimum of maintenance for their properties. No wonder that crime figures mounted rapidly, or that one of the most usual crimes was now arson. By the mid-seventies large areas of such places as the South Bronx in New York had, literally, been burnt out, and were being allowed to decay into wilderness once more: a wilderness disfigured by the rusting wrecks of cars, the blackened skeletons of shops, schools and houses, and acre upon acre of cracking concrete slabs.
Against conditions such as these the civil rights movement was largely helpless. Its achievements were of inestimable advantage to the black middle class: the number of blacks in professional occupations doubled between 1960 and 1974, and their place in society was increasingly unchallenged. But most blacks were not middle-class; indeed about half of them lived on, or below, or near, the poverty-line, the line below which, statisticians reckoned, their income was inadequate for the necessities of life. It proved exceedingly difficult to find effective means of helping them, though Lyndon Johnson talked of a war on poverty, and A. Philip Randolph proposed a ‘Negro Marshall Plan’, which would have involved the expenditure of $10,000,000,000 a year for ten years: but even the liberal Congress of the mid-sixties balked at the idea of expenditure on anything like this scale for such a cause (though at the same time it was voting much larger sums for the war in Vietnam) and after the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency in 1968 it was clearly vain to hope for anything of the kind. Indeed, one of Nixon’s advisers tactlessly suggested that the time had come to practise a little ‘benign neglect’ of black problems. This outraged the black community, but outrage alone was not going to change anything.
The dilemma was most cruelly exposed in the last years of Martin Luther King. With the passage of the Votin
g Rights Act the first phase in ‘the Second Reconstruction’ was virtually complete: in political and legal terms blacks now were, or would soon become, formally equal to whites. But their social and economic deprivations were as bad as ever, and it was clearly incumbent on the leaders of ‘the Movement’ to launch a second phase which would tackle the horrors of black life in the North. At first King tried to apply the Gandhian tactics which had proved so successful in the South, but they did not work. For one thing he had decided that the war in Vietnam was mopping up economic resources that should have been used to improve conditions at home; that it was killing a disproportionate number of black Americans; that it was hideously cruel; and that it might lead to world war. These considerations impelled the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to denounce the war repeatedly; but in so doing he alienated the administration which was waging it. Lyndon Johnson was a vindictive man who never liked or trusted Martin King; he never again gave more than token countenance and protection to the activities of the SCLC. What this meant became painfully clear when, in 1966, King took his organization to Chicago and launched a series of marches through the all-white suburbs of that city, hoping to bring down the structure of de facto housing segregation there, for he reasoned that if the blacks could break out of the ghetto they might find decent jobs, houses and schools waiting for them. His concrete aim was to shame the city of Chicago into living up to its own open-housing ordinances, its own regulations which required, for example, that all rented property should be repainted once a year. He did manage to get a surprising number of concessions out of the city administration, and a large number of paper promises. But the spirit of willing compliance, essential for real progress, was lacking. Richard J. Daley, the mayor, was the last of the great city bosses. He was under no pressure from Washington to work with King. He knew that the black movement itself was splitting, as the younger activists turned away from King and non-violence to the phantasms of ‘Black Power’ and war on whitey – phantasms which blended all too well into the criminal violence in which the days of all too many young blacks were passed. He felt that his own political power in Chicago was challenged, and in any case he could hardly make concessions to the blacks when the whites on whom he depended politically were showing such bitter hostility to the marchers. The climax came when 200 marchers through the suburb of Cicero (Al Capone’s former lordship) were met with an incessant rain of bottles and stones: the inhabitants of Cicero, mostly Polish-Americans, saw the black demonstrators as embodiments and precursors of all the forces which were threatening their way of life: but for the protection of the police, and the National Guard, there would certainly have been killings. King withdrew from Chicago, to carry on the struggle elsewhere; then, on 4 April 1968, he was assassinated by yet another of the wretched, half-insane murderers who were so tragically common at that time.